Metal Gear Solid 3 vs The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion vs The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess vs Resident Evil 4 2009
Results Round Three Sunday, May 31st, 2009 Ulti's Analysis After Resident Evil 4 struggled and outlasted Kingdom Hearts 2 twice, this was supposed to be an easy match even with how close it got to Twilight Princess the previous round. Twilight Princess was a lock for first, RE4 a lock for second, and MGS3/Oblivion while strong weren't supposed to get close. But a funny thing happened on the way to RE4's victory parade. Metal Gear Solid 3 turned out to be a total beast of a game, and it would come damn close to pulling off the upset here. First and foremost, Twilight Princess dominated this poll compared to its round 2 efforts. Neither RE4 nor MGS3 took a lead on it like RE4 did the previous round, which gives some credibility to the Kingdom Hearts overlapping with Zelda theory. Now as for Resident Evil 4, it was clear MGS3 was going to give it trouble within the first five minutes. RE4 had bracket votes and only had a lead of 20 early, and sure enough it only took 45 minutes for MGS3 to begin building a lead. This was more or less the final blow to any hopes of RE4 making the final, but it had much more pressing matters at the moment. It was a painstaking process, but MGS3 overnight built up a 150 vote lead. RE4 cut it in half rather quickly, but MGS3 was able to recover and then hammer out some solid updates. Before long, the match seemed over. The lead reached 650 votes by morning, which was a death sentence to RE4 given how bad Resident Evil's day vote normally is. Metal Gear Solid's day vote isn't any better, but given how RE4 is a quasi-Nintendo title and a quasi-PS2 title with a strong Nintendo/PS2 presence in the poll, it had appeared RE4's luck had finally run out. However, every contest has one entry whose every match is cardiac, and that entrant for this contest was Resident Evil 4. After somehow stalling MGS3's advance during the morning vote, it began shaving away at the lead during the DSV. And when I say shaving, I mean literally. This was one of the slowest freaking comeback attempts we've ever had to watch. RE4 began stalling a 650 vote lead at around 8:30 in the morning. Come the ASV, the lead was 200, but MGS3 came out and won the early parts of the ASV and pushed it back to 250. But yet again when the match seemed over, RE4 pushed back and started shaving some more. RE4 "won" the ASV, but it took three hours to take the lead starting from down 250 votes. This wasn't earth-shattering by any means, but a lead is a lead and RE4 took it around 6. From here, RE4 began its long, looooooooooong effort to sllllllooooooowwwwwwlllllllllyyyyyy build up a lead of its own, which was actually really bad news given MGS's history of 11th hour cheating. This time however there would be no "random" MGS spikes near the end to save the day. RE4's match to the win remained constant all the way until the end of the match, giving it its third straight win by less than 1000 votes. This wasn't good for those of us that had it in the final, but it was good if you liked close matches. For the third straight round, RE4 pulled a day vote rabbit out of its ass to win a match it had no business winning. This could have created a bandwagon effort, but this was impossible given the competition next round. A Zelda, Brawl and MGS4? Not even RE4 could pull that one off, but it ended up having a damn interesting run. Not that this match itself was entertaining (taking 13 hours to swing 1000 votes rarely is), but watching RE4's antics was quite the treat, even if it was destined to end next round. Match Trends Ngamer's Same Day Analysis Match Prediction I've got to agree with the Crew in saying that this one should be rather dull- probably the last less than exciting matchup we'll see this season. Yes RE4 impressed us last round, but I get the feeling that there may have been a slight bit of overlap between TP and KH that could have been helping it out, whereas this time if any two games hold each other back I'd think it would be the mature 3PSes in RE4 and MGS3. So Zelda ought to be able to extend its win a little bit and shoot for 30, while I'd imagine MGS takes a slight step back the the usual percentage the series pulls and is never in contention to advance. If I had to pick a "surprise" result, I'd go with a slight overperformance from Oblivion. The game has impressed despite a rough path where it had to split the RPG vote with ToS twice and WoW once- now that it has free reign on the whole genre as well as all the Xbox and PC vote, pushing for 20 here doesnt't seem out of the question. Possibly it could even contend with MGS3? ...nay, let's not get too crazy! Not too much else to say, so final answer: * The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - 30.41% * Resident Evil 4 - 27.40% * Metal Gear Solid 3 - 22.32% * The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - 19.87% Seems... okay, I think. Next Day Review Holy smokes MGS3! (As of when I'm writing this, RE4's up about 300 with about 30 minutes left to play.) Golly, I thought if today was going to be interesting at all it would have to be because RE4 made a late run at TP; instead I must have been dead on about it sharing fans with Kingdom Hearts, because boy does Zelda ever look like a worldbeater here. The showing by RE really baffles me though... I mean yes I expected MGS3 to hold it back a little as another mature PS2 action option, but on the plus side it got to jettison a true shooter in HL2- don't get how that makes it fall back to its R1 strength. I guess the easy answer is that it becomes tougher and tougher to knock out MGS games as more quality alternatives are added to the mix, and Oblivion certainly has some legit strength (yess, matching by 20% pred!), so these 4 fit the bill. Just weird that RE4 had a whale of a time pulling in front of 3, considering how 1 barely even put up a fight in going down to the two Nintendo options. Guess I was way off in my original 1 > 2 > 3 prediction for this series! External Links * Match Updates * Guru Match Predictions * Oracle Match Results • Previous Match • Next Match Category:2009 Spring Contest Matches